'Virtual clone' will help to cure human beings

Thanks to the "virtual clone," created on the Lobachevsky supercomputer, doctors can now give diagnoses and develop better methods of curing patients.

With the help of a
supercomputer, scientists from the Lobachevsky Nizhegorodsky State University
have turned a collection of tomograms into a 3D model of a human being. Now
doctors, without performing surgery, can enter a person and see any anomaly
affecting him, even at the level of one of his cells. The development is
extremely detail-oriented: for the "virtual" heart alone the
mathematicians needed to take more than 50 million parameters into
consideration.

Professor Vadim Turlapov from
the Mathematical and Computer Faculty of the Nizhegorodsky State University
said that until recently doctors had been using two-dimensional tomograms for
making diagnoses. "When you then see a three-dimensional image of the
patient, you get the feeling of a "virtual clone," although we still
don't call the model by that name. It is a 3-D visualization of medical data".

Virtual anatomical lathe

A model of each specific
patient is created for solving practical medical problems. "The 3-D
reconstruction's main objective is to detect anomalies within the organism's
bones, organs and tissues," said Turlapov.

The Lobachevsky supercomputer started working at the university in Nizhny
Novgorod in 2014. Its peak capacity consists of about 600 teraflops (600
trillion operations per second). The computer is one of the largest
supercomputers in the world. In Russia it is the second in terms of power (the
first is located in the Lomonosov Moscow State University).

"We have created a system
of anomaly measurements - their size, density and so on. These parameters help
us determine the diagnosis and observe whether the sickness is progressing or
regressing, and whether the medicine being used is effective or not."

Moreover, with the help of the
Nizhegorodsky development, which has changed the meaning of the 3-D clone
parameter, doctors can observe the behavior of a model, that is, how the
organism will react to the types of cure.

"Usually the doctor needs
a model that is not the full height of a body but rather just of some organ,
for example, the region of the heart or the circulatory system," explains
Turlapov. "We can create a model for studies, make a cut in any part and
show the tissues that usually cannot be seen. Essentially, the technology
performs the functions of a "virtual anatomical lathe."

Many companies have already
tried creating tools with these functions, in particular, the American
Anatomage. But the main aim of most of the technologies on the market is
educational. The tool created by Russian scientists, on the other hand, has a
practical, or rather diagnostic, aim - one to cure specific patients.

Clone in your tablet

Scientists from the Nizhegorodsky
State University have already created a storage system for medical data on the
Lobachevsky supercomputer and are ready to receive patients' tomograms for
future visualization.

There already exists the technical possibility to make
the 3-D visualization even for tablets or smartphones, which means that the
patient himself can see his body or show it to any doctor. By using
contemporary technology the creation of a "computer model" of a
specific patient occurs very effectively: "The spiral computer tomograph
can make a full tomogram of a body in ten seconds," remarked Turlapov.

With its broad application the
Nizhegorodsky development will give any doctor access to 3-D visualization of
medical data, and not just the specialist who is performing the tomograph.

"With time, by acquiring
information on a specific patient, the computer will be able to detect the
change of the organs' condition," says Turlapov. "The patient will
then turn to a doctor with this information." In two-three years the scientists
are planning to perfect the automatic diagnostic system on the 3-D human model.
Therefore, the computer will not only "illuminate" the problem zone
on the tomogram, it will independently make the diagnosis.